The Forerunner of All Things

The very first verse in the Dhammapada: “The mind is the forerunner of all things.” Things are achieved through the mind. So this is where we start.

There are people who would tell us that we don’t have any choice, that everything we do or say is determined by forces outside of us. But that’s not what the Buddha taught. He taught it the other way around. The mind is the forerunner. The mind is the instigator. It shapes everything we experience.

So try to shape things well. You’ve got the raw material coming in from your past actions. The question is, you’re going to be feeding off this, so can you fix it well? That’s what you do in the present moment. This is why we meditate, to train the mind so it has a range of skills. If you have only one skill—if all you do is boil things—that’s what you get, boiled food all the time. It may be good food or bad food, but it all comes out boiled.

But if you have a range of skills, then you know what to do with your food, and you can fix them in ways that are more interesting, that are more pleasant—and more useful, basically. The pleasure that comes, say, from material things is one thing. But the pleasure that comes from a well-trained mind is something else entirely.

So you work on the skills you need right now. You work on your mindfulness, your alertness, your ardency. You learn lessons; you try to remember them. Then you’re alert to what you’re doing right now to see what needs to be applied right now, and you make the effort to apply whatever is needed, whether it’s easy or hard. As they say, “The Great Way is not difficult for those with no preferences.”

Of course, you’re going to prefer not suffering to suffering. But whatever is needed to not suffer, even though it may be difficult in the beginning, you want to do it. As the Buddha said, there are some pains that come with doing skillful things, but those are short lived. They’re way outweighed by the long-terms pleasure and sense of well-being that comes when you do things that are skillful.

You get more sensitive to what’s going on in the mind and the body in the present moment. You realize that acting on skillful intentions, even though it may involve difficulties, is in itself pleasant—in the sense that you can feel proud of yourself. You can have a sense of self-esteem that what you’re doing is worthwhile. You’re not stooping to do things that are beneath you. So the pleasure that comes from the path is always there, in spite of the difficulties.

So. Stick with it. As the Buddha said, it will be for your long-term welfare and happiness. We hear so much about being in the present moment as if that were the end goal of the practice. But the Buddha defined wisdom as your ability to see what’s for your long-term well-being and to act on it, whether you like it or not. So we’re not here just for the present moment. There’s something deeper still that can be accessed in the present moment, but it’s outside of space and time.

In the meantime, you try to create the conditions for now and the future that make it easier and easier to get the mind to that place where you really can open up to something that’s beyond it. This is why we train ourselves. This is why we keep coming back to the training, because it takes us to a place that’s beyond our imagination how good it can be.